The Horrors of Online Dating

Online dating is the devil.

I know some of you are going to disagree with me, so let’s get an obvious argument out of the way right now.

I personally do not know anyone that ended up in a good relationship from online dating. However, everyone else seems to know someone that knows someone whose sister’s cousin’s best friend’s mailman met his or her current partner online, and they’re getting married soon.

Awww. That’s nice. To them, if they exist, I say “congratulations, I hope it works out.”

To everyone else, I only have one thing to say: stay the fuck away from online dating.

The Odds Are Against You

You may not know this about me, but I worked for an online dating website once. It was a couple of years ago, and I worked in the marketing department. It was the most horrifying job I’ve ever done, partly because of the deranged people I worked with, and mostly due to the insane stats I saw behind the scenes.

Let me put it this way: dating websites don’t want you to succeed. You think they care about you, about providing a good service, but they don’t. In fact, it’s better for them to have you fail on a regular basis, so that you can keep paying their premium fees of $19.99 a month.

They will lie about the latest members that are online, they will lie about the amount of active female members, and they will enjoy taking your money for as long as they can. Trust me, I’ve seen it happen.

Dating websites also have a horribly screwed up ratio of men-to-women. We’re talking about an easy 90-to-10 percent distribution, with the 90 being men. Yep, we geeks are lazy, and love being online as much as we can.

Beat’Em Up Guy! Skill, Faith and Strength!

As geeks, we have a tendency to avoid confrontation in the real world, be it at a club, supermarket, or your buddy’s living room. We play games, and we trash talk each other, but we always reach an amicable conclusion in person.

Enter the online realm, and everything changes.

Have you ever heard of John Gabriel’s Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory? Go ahead and click the image below for the full size. I’ll wait.

Essentially, the theory states that normal humans become complete fuckwads online.

And on dating websites? It’s especially true.

A friend of mine once chatted with a guy who threatened to “hack your computer with a virus unless you show me your tits NAO”. She laughed, and told him to go fuck himself, but that didn’t stop him from threatening her some more for another ten minutes. I guess he wasn’t a l33t h4xor though, because the virus never materialized, and my friend got to keep her tits safe.

Online dating is full of ridiculous events like that. And there’s a reason behind the madness.

The fact that there are 9 men for every 1 woman online creates an insane amount of competition. Whereas average joe has an average shot in the real world, average joe has to fight through a veritable army of men online to get what he wants.

Do you know what kind of guys thrive in that kind of environment? Dudes that don’t give a damn. Example: a guy online will message, in his first week, something ridiculous like 400 women. Do you think he gives a shit about any of those girls? Nope. They’re all just numbers, and if he threatens enough girls with his tits virus, eventually someone will be dumb enough to cave.

Experiment

As I ventured into online dating for myself, armed to the teeth with skills, I conducted a highly scientific, postmodernistical experiment from the future: I created two women’s profile to see how many messages I would receive.

The profile that had no pictures, no description, nothing except for the fact that I was a woman, received about 3 messages a day for the first few days, before eventually moving out of the “new user” category. At that point I would receive about 1 message every two days.

The profile with a picture and mediocre description received more than 200 messages over the course of 4 days.

Conclusion: as long as you’re a woman with a picture, you’re getting 200 messages. That’s the equivalent of being approached at a bar by 200 different guys. She will obviously receive a crazy ego boost, as all of a sudden she’s a hot commodity. The upside is she feels good. The downside is it makes her extra picky online.

This leads to the guys having to compete more. If the average girls online are hot commodities, and they’re no longer going for average guys, well, the guys need to step it up, and become more than average. They’ll lie through their teeth, because as her standards go up, their lies need to go up too.

Dudes will go to any length to get laid, believe me, and if that involves putting up a fake pic of sixpack abs and filling their profiles with a million dollar job, condo in Monaco, and private jet, they’ll do it.

What’s left?

Well, at the end of the day, the online environment gets really depressing. The sane guys don’t want to fight over the scraps, so they turn off their profiles in disgust. The sane girls are tired of being harassed by lying monkeys, so they turn off their profiles in disgust. Who’s left?

Students that are bored, that want something to do when they’re not on Facebook, or studying for exams.

Women that aren’t exceptional in any way, with incredibly high standards, thanks to the monkeys and their attention.

Men that survived the competition, and have become frikkin’ sharks with laser beams on their heads.They have created a series of messages with high success rates, which all lead to meeting the girl in person, only for the meeting to end in disappointment on both sides because no one is as they seem.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: geeks, there is no substitute for real world interactions. Get out of your house, go to where the women are, and meet someone in real life. Even if you fail, I guarantee you have a greater chance at happiness than if you sit at home and waste time online.

Do you have an awesome online dating horror story you’d like to share? Drop it in the comments!

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I should write my own post on this subject. You see, anyone who knows me knows this…I’m awesome. So why do I message 79 single women on POF and receive ten replies, and 0 dates? Does my online game suck? I’m a professional writer. I can flip a poetic love letter like Casanova. I’m also a dating coach. I teach guys how to pick up girls on the street and in bars. Yet I can’t get a date with a pretty girl off the Internet? You’ll have better luck at the Starbucks lineup.

It’s true, you ARE awesome. And you will have better luck at the Starbucks lineup. Which is why I recommend not getting on POF at all. Every second wasted on there is a second you could be using to meet a girl IRL.

Yep, I’m one of those. I’m actually PRO online dating believe it or not. Hitting a little closer to home, my dad + my stepmother met via the standard match.com and two of my (very attractive and talented) close friends met their husbands 100% online. They even dated majority online. HOWEVER, most of the YOUNG girls I know that do go to online dating sites usually do it just for kicks and never seriously meet anyone. Also, I gotta admit, my friends met their husbands through geek/tech/art forums, not a dating site.

My conclusion? Online dating has a lot of hits and misses (no pun intended). But as a lady who has developed many close friendships, and perhaps a small romance or two in my younger days, all online – I recommend avoiding the paying dating sites and, if you must surf for salaciousness, try a community forum of something you’re actually interested in. Even if the lady you chat with ends up being 38 and lives in Texas, at least you’ll save your $19.99 and get some interesting conversation (and perhaps fantasies) out of it.

You ARE one of those! I guess your father and stepmother are the ones that I say “aww, that’s nice. I hope it works out” to.

Regarding online forums, I don’t particularly enjoy those either, but they’re not as full of trolls and sharks as a regular dating website, so it’s more acceptable in my books. Plus, people that meet on online forums usually bond over whatever topic the forum is about, be it furries or S&M. More compatibility there perhaps?

Definitely. Compatibility is key as it is the best icebreaker for chatting with strangers. Meeting in forums for something specific (in my case it was AMV editing) is the online equivalent of meeting at, lets say, a concert. Automatically, you know that you have something in common and that’s great for the shy people. If life is too boring to talk about, an epic drum solo can keep the newly introduced entertained for quite a while.

Personally, I’ve INSTANTLY started chatting with any male who makes any hint that they’ve played a final fantasy. It’s my real-life AXE body-spray-like weakness (FYI, AXE bodyspray is my real life repellent). Whether they’re wearing some small token or I overhear a complaint about how it sucks nowadays, I will have to engage. Course, this is not the best “picking up women” technique – unless you plan to practice at comicon.

I met lots of guys from Craigslist, more then most turned out to be dumb-fucks, I went on dates with a few, a few became my boyfriend for a while, I met one guy on a furry site (yes), and he turned out to be a totally different person IRL, then I signed up for POF & OK Cupid at the same time to meet ANYONE in Cincinnati when I moved.

One guy told me he was married and just wanted to fuck – um, NO! But I was bored and he messaged me on my birthday (whom I had no one to spend it with, and soaked up all the compliments). Next guy asked me before an in-person date to tie myself up and blindfold and leave the door open – FUCK NO! [The end messaging guys]

Then I met a girl and met with her and her girlfriend to have a puppy-play date (yes, we set this up thru a dating site, lol). They actually took me out the weekend after my birthday and I had a real birthday, super sweeties. I missed one of their birthdays cuz I was sick, but made sure to be at the other birthday, where I met my current boyfriend, who is the nicest sweetest geek I’ve ever met.

Such a glorious adventure. I laugh at what people think girls will do online; Are they serious? Who does that shit? What is wrong with these people? I don’t think I will ever know – but your post did shed a bit of light on the subject for me, Thanks Rami

That is retarded. Geeks don’t give a shit about IQ. We care about shared interests. Does she like comics? Anime? Video Games? Magic: The Gathering? Way more important than how many digits of pi she can memorize.

I work for an online dating site currently (been there for 2 years). The culture is awesome and staffed by really nice people who do seem to genuinely care about people meeting and the ratio is 2 to 1 men. That being said, I still think online dating sucks for the reasons you have mentioned. Real world is far better.

We bought a speed dating company last year and I’ve been sent to many events for free which has been good. I didn’t get any matches the first 4 or 5 I went to, but I guess I’m getting better at it and have become more relaxed, so I get at least 1 per event and sometimes more. I have a date tonight from an event on Thursday with an attractive woman. I’m middle aged, so meeting woman is getting way harder as my neighborhood is quite young. If you think OLD is bad when your in your 20s, try your 40s. I just got messaged by obese women who were 5 to 7 years older than me. Just proves the bloggers point that women are incredibly picky online with an inflated sense of self-worth. I’m 6’2″ and 200 LBS with a full head of hair and look about mid 30s. Women tell me I’m above average looking all the time, and the only interest I get online is from older, obese women. Sad….

You want to talk frustrating, I signed up for eharmony. That is an exercise in futility. I was barely shown any matches for 3 months. Finally I got to escalate with a very pretty woman and got to the messaging stage after 2 weeks. She suddenly closed the communication and I never actually got a real message from her. It’s just terrible and that’s been my experience on all online dating sites and on Tinder. Women have next-best-itis. It’s impossible to hold their attention and they run off after someone they think is better.

Don’t waste your time and get out there and meet women. If I were in my 20s again, I’d be chatting up women at coffee shops and pubs all the time. I still do when the opportunity presents itself, but I don’t get as many and most of the attractive older women I do run into in public have a ring on the finger

Hey, I'm Rami, the man behind the curtain. I'd be really happy if some advice on this blog helped you meet the woman of your dreams. I also like talking in videogame metaphors, so it helps if you're a geek.